Winter Rain

As he stood there in the doorway, the sudden blast of the riven air assaulted his nostrils with the rank odor of the storm, not only permeating his heightened sense of smell, but seeming to penetrate every pore of his body. Barechested and shivering slightly, Deidecker stepped onto the porch, then stopped, warily cocking an ear back into the cabin as the thunder rumbled away, once more creating that eternal void of silence in its wake.

“I love you, Gritta,” the old scout vowed in a whisper like rawhide dragged over rough ground. “More now—than ever. And one day, I know you’ll come back from …”

As much as the newspaperman strained, he didn’t hear the rest of Hook’s plaintive words. Instead, the only sound from that blanket-doored room some twenty feet away was more of the fevered grappling in the dark.

Deidecker turned away to load his pipe, then struck a match, shielding it against the incessant breeze washing down from the peaks and the glaciers and that never-summer snow far above him in the darkness, where for that moment he wasn’t sure just what was sky and cloud, and what might truly be hulking mountain ready to tumble down upon this high land of awesome silence intertwined with the brooding black of wilderness night.

Then with his next sharp-tanged breath, the rain came hard upon that place.

And when it did, the breeze freshened like a cold slap against his bare cheek. He gasped in the sudden explosion of the summer-tanged ozone as the huge, wad-sized drops hurled themselves onto that crude porch, wetting his bare feet and soaking the bottoms of the canvas dungarees he had wisely purchased back in Omaha before journeying west to northern Wyoming.

Deidecker did not mind summer’s reeking, prairie cold, really. Nor the chilling, bone-numbing wet of the storm’s fury driven at him. Rather than fleeing, he instead settled there in the woman’s chair, puffing bowl after bowl of his favorite pipe, brooding on all the old man had spoken of just the day before, thinking on all that he wanted to ask Hook with the thunderous coming of this second day among the memories and the ghosts of years and lives gone the way of summer snows. His bare skin warmed with the closeness of those strikes of green, phosphorescent lightning, and his mind electrified with all the old man had already told him. Then he began to dwell on all the old man had kept from telling him.

So Deidecker sat a long time, riding out summer’s late storm there in the old woman’s rocker, sensing for himself the chair’s singular place worn down in those two ruts she had scoured into the rough boards of the porch over her years of roosting here below Cloud Peak. He could almost feel some of the woman’s warmth remnant in the worn cotton pad, sense the touch of her flesh against his as he laid his bare forearms along the tops of the yellowpine armrests worn white from those endless hours gone in staring up into the hulking immensity of these mountains.

Only when Nate realized the storm was passing onto the plains below, its fury headed east for South Dakota, did he become aware of the subtle change in the quality of light in the yard beyond, the texture of skylight drenched over the nearby hills and flung up against the tall peaks, uplifted like a young woman’s breasts yearning for her lover’s touch. So close. So damned seductively close.

Of a frightening sudden he became aware of the old man.

Hook was standing in the open doorjamb, as frozen as a winter-gaunt wolf caught in the action of hunting snow-shoe hare, one paw in the air and the other three ready to spring, his eyes intent on Deidecker.

As much as Nate was startled to find the old scout staring at him in the murky, ashen light of predawn, he quickly reassured himself it was as natural a thing as could be: To find an old plainsman like Hook sneaking up on a man unawares, studying him as that hungry wolf would his quarry. Nate swallowed down his surprise like the most bitter, metallic taste of cold fear. And tried to smile.

“G’morning, Mr. Hook,” he whispered as cheerfully as he could muster.

Hook tore his eyes from the newsman’s, staring off into the darkness that reeked with the scent of the storm’s passing. “I’ll allow you didn’t know,” began the old man without budging from the open doorway. “But that there’s Gritta’s chair, Mr. Deidecker. No one ever sits in Gritta’s chair. So I’ll allow you didn’t know any better, and pass it off this time.”

Deidecker sprang up like he’d been bit, wheeling to stare at the chair, its flattened, faded seat pillow seeming to glare back at him accusingly.

“No … I didn’t know,” he stammered. “But … I’ll … next time I won’t—”

“Care for something to eat, Mr. Deidecker?” Hook asked, abruptly changing the subject. He turned slowly in the doorway, inching back into the cabin that filled ever so slowly with the seep of predawn’s gray light. “Course you do. What man in his right mind don’t want something to eat come morning get-up time?”